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“... point the manager intervened with ‘This is the Hon. Mrs Frank Pakenham’ and ‘This is Mrs Beatrice Webb.’ The two then fell over each other to exchange civilities. As her Diaries show, Mrs Webb had fought a stiff fight not to be called Lady Passfield: but the author admits to no qualms about becoming a ...”

“... the reasons for the war or the possibilities of its outcome. Notably, one of them did. To Beatrice Webb the question of who was going to win the current war was immaterial. Her tone was both royal and prophetic; it catered for what might go on beyond the tomb. ‘As we happen to believe in the rightness and eventual success of Soviet ...”

“... persuasive (as Millicent Garrett Fawcett tartly remarked in the next issue), but the signatures of Beatrice Webb and the coterie of Oxford women who had been instrumental in founding Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall must have given suffragists pause. For a time, then, and as Bush implies, the suffrage battle was less a ‘sex war’ than an argument ...”

“... The only woman I have ever known who is a real orator, who has the gift of public persuasion’, Beatrice Webb noted when she met Annie Besant. ‘But to see her speak made me shudder. It is not womanly to thrust yourself before the world.’ Extraordinary ‘self-assurance’ was the quality picked out by Gladstone, when, as prime minister, he took time off to review Besant’s autobiography in 1893 ...”

“... parents. William Morris, for example, was a purveyor of ‘bogus archaisms and mock heroics’, Beatrice Webb was an ‘arrogant woman of limited intelligence’, Edmund Gosse was the ‘gentleman’s outfitter’ of English literary culture. West’s scorn for the ‘genteel sub-academic’ Gosse is withering throughout: yet if his own account of his ...”

“... scientist John Tyndall, and many social scientists and social reformers such as Charles Booth and Beatrice Potter (later Webb). Moreover, many who could not accept the whole package of Comtean positivism still tacitly or explicitly acknowledged its intellectual inspiration. Both Darwin and Herbert Spencer, for ...”

“... Viscount Stansgate. The family lived at 40 Grosvenor Road, Westminster, next door to Sidney and Beatrice Webb. With his elder brother Michael, Anthony went to the local school (Westminster), and he grew up thinking that he might work locally too, just like his dad. Lady Stansgate gives another insight on the boys’ upbringing: ‘They used to pretend ...”

“... at the end of that year, was made redundant by Toynbee Hall? The career of Clement Attlee – to Beatrice Webb ‘a meaningless figure’, to Chips Channon a ‘bee without a sting’, and to the Conservative backbenchers a ‘sheep in sheep’s clothing’ – illustrates not only the importance of luck but also the danger of confusing personal style ...”

“... seem to do pretty well, especially the women. Jane Addams is here, no doubt rightly, but not Beatrice Webb. Susan Anthony, Emily Balch, Carrie Catt, Mary Lease, Margaret Sanger – all these appear on the American side, balanced (if that is the right word) by no less than three Pankhursts (Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia). John P. Altgeld, not ...”

“... She asked, then, for an uninterrupted two hours. Although Shaw could not resist referring to Beatrice Webb – who had said that household management should take no more than thirty minutes a day – and to ‘Russian women’ who did a fulltime job on top of everything else, he was ready with a solution. Everyone, he reminded Margaret, including ...”

“... unpopular not just with employers and governments, but also with the new middle-class socialists. Beatrice Webb held a sumptuous dinner to celebrate the first ILP election victories in 1895. One of the guests was Tom Mann, who made his position quite plain. Mrs Webb was indignant: ‘He is possessed,’ she ...”

“... Archer is here, and Wells, a very good likeness, waspish, lewd and funny – apart from Beatrice Webb he was Shaw’s shrewdest critic, crediting him with a ‘flimsy acquisitive sort of mind’, and describing the Life Force as a phrase embodying ‘an almost encyclopaedic philosophical and biological ignorance’. He also castigated the ...”

“... It’s unlikely that Sidney Webb features in Tony Blair’s pantheon of political heroes. It would, in fact, be difficult to think of a less likely match for Tony and Cherie than Sidney and Beatrice. Yet, after almost a century, the Webbs’ thinking about local government – their disdain for civic initiative and zeal for state uniformity – still appears to influence Labour Party policy ...”

“... in the tradition of such other feminist intellectuals as Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller and Beatrice Webb, regarded her stories and poems as sugar-coated pills. ‘I have never made any pretence of being literary,’ she wrote in the autobiography; and even describing her own life did not interest her very much, for ‘my real interest is in ...”

“... respectable and potentially ennobling pastime. Looking back on her own ‘apprenticeship’, Beatrice Webb recognised its similarity with Margot’s early experience. But Beatrice, coming from a family of comparable size and material comfort, combined greater dedication with a more profound understanding of the ...”